


Coward.

by OfficialStarsandGutters



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 07:34:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30068850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfficialStarsandGutters/pseuds/OfficialStarsandGutters
Summary: Coward.It was imprinted into you. Terror reinforced over years of every kind of abuse.Coward.You thought you could be more than this. You thought you could be something else, but you’re not, and they all see it, all say it, burn it into the core of your identity.Coward.You accept it like your scarlet letter because you never learned forgiveness, especially not towards yourself.-See notes for detailed content warnings
Relationships: Kevin Day/Jean Moreau, Kevin Day/Riko Moriyama, Kevin Day/Thea Muldani
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	Coward.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly this is 90% messy vent content I just needed to get it out because I keep being mad about the fandom belittlement of Kevin’s abuse and mockery of him for being “cowardly” as if he’s not just a victim having a trauma response.  
> (The other 10% is messy character study)
> 
> I don’t usually vibe with second person narration but it felt fitting for purpose.
> 
> Also the pre-canon timeline confuses me and I can’t remember what order things happened in the books lmaooo. I did my best. 
> 
> This one is heavy. Heed the warnings:  
> Reference to parental death  
> Explicit descriptions of abuse - physical, verbal, emotional, and (less explicitly) sexual.  
> Forced non consensual acts involving minors (NOT explicitly described but it’s alluded to)  
> Depictions of CPTSD including depression and anxiety symptoms  
> Unhealthy use of alcohol  
> Use of an ableist slur (referenced from canon)  
> Canon compliant character death

There was a time when the worst pain you had to deal with was scratched up palms or scabbed knees. Running too fast, jumping too far, climbing trees way too ambitious for your small limbs. You were so full of life. You ran and laughed and yelled and you were loved. You were so, so loved.

There was a time when the worst things you had to fear were imagined monsters under the bed, creatures shifting in the closet, whispers in the shadows. She would come and shine a light and show you it was _okay, Kevin, you’re okay, my love_ . She would hold you in her arms and she always felt warm and she always smelled like fresh laundry and she would say _I won’t ever let anything hurt you, Kevin. I’m going to keep you safe_ , and you would believe her.

There was a time when the world felt impossibly big. Where the sky stretched forever above you, and the horizon was only a limit for your eyes; your mind stretching far beyond it, your imagination boundless. People would ask what you wanted to be when you grew up and you said _an exy player_ , because obviously, mommy would like that, but also _an archaeologist_ . You’d carry plastic dinosaurs around in your tiny fists and don your Indiana Jones hat with pride. _Exy player during the day, archaeologist at night, the man that tells you the stuff on the history shows at the weekends._ Your dreams were too big to hold just one ambition. 

There was a time when you were your own Kevin Day, son of Kayleigh Day, little boy free to make your own decisions. You were fearless and you were safe and you were _so loved, Kevin, you’re so loved, baby, I love you so much, my sweet boy_.

Then mommy went away, and the world got smaller, and the world got darker.

*

You were forced to leave the sky behind and go underground, forced into the Nest where even time went by the Raven’s rules, and the world that you had loved was merely ash in your memory.

You were not Kevin Day, boy of possibilities, anymore. You were Kevin Day: Son of Exy. You were Kevin Day: Number Two of the Ravens. You were Kevin Day: whatever the fuck Tetsumi Moriyama wanted you to be. 

You were Kevin Day: Riko Moriyama’s plaything.

*

When you first met Riko, you were shorter than him. A grief stricken thing curled in on yourself. You didn’t like to look people in the eyes. You had gone from a familiar world of technicolour, to a world of strangers painted in black and red. Every morning you woke up and for a few moments you forgot your mommy was gone, and every morning you had to remember, it was like losing her all over again.

Riko had seen your grief as a challenge. A barrier he had to power through. He was relentless in pulling you into his games, and when you didn’t play how he wanted, he would get angry. He would stomp and yell and sometimes hit you. You didn’t like that, so you started doing what he said.

*

Time passed. Your grief did not get lighter, but it got easier to carry. You grew taller than Riko, but so did his anger, stretching out beyond him, searing everything.

In public you drew your number two on your cheek and you painted on your smile for the cameras. You smiled, and smiled, and smiled, but behind locked doors that smile was a grimace, your teeth bars for injustice and anger, a cage for your pain. Your body was a canvas and Riko’s medium of choice was violence. 

It felt worse, sometimes, when he didn’t hit you. When he made you sit and listen to all his nasty words. Sometimes he spoke of your mother, and you bit your lip until it bled, bit your tongue until it swole in your mouth. Sometimes he did nothing to you, but made you watch as he took Jean apart. 

*

The first time he took a knife to Jean you threw up for two hours afterwards, until bile burned your throat. Jean, with his shaking hands and sliced skin, rubbed your back and stroked your hair and had the audacity to tell you it was alright even as his blood left lines on your shirt.

“None of this is alright,” you said, broken French catching and snagging on your desperate tone.

“No, but it’s what we have, so we have to be alright with it.”

You heaved again, and Jean’s fingers rubbed circles on your neck that burned long after he lifted his touch away.

*

The first time Riko told you to hold Jean down, you refused. You refused as he hit you. You refused as he pushed you down and twisted your arm until it hurt so bad it made you cry. You refused when he pulled your hair, slammed your head against the wall, let you crumple to the ground with blood in your mouth.

“Kevin, please. Just do as he says,” Jean had whispered, and it was his soft words that broke the resolve Riko’s rage couldn’t. You held his wrists gently, but when he thrashed against your hands, Riko made you hold tighter. Hot tears ran down your cheeks and one of them dropped onto Jean’s forehead. His eyes squinted open, two soft brown pools of pain, and then they clenched shut again. You closed yours too, felt your sob shake through you and into him. 

Riko saw your weakness for Jean as an open wound and he rubbed salt in it every chance he got, until you learned to swallow it down, bury it deep inside yourself, make your face an empty mask and give Riko _nothing_.

Jean Moreau was the first boy you loved, and you helped Riko hurt him in ways that still have you waking up sweat soaked and shaking from nightmares. 

“I’m sorry,” you had said to Jean, shaky fingers trying their best to disinfect his wounds. He had touched your cheek softly and your armour had dropped away like melting snow. 

“It’s okay, Kevin. We’re just doing what we have to to survive.”

It wasn’t okay. You knew that. Jean knew that. None of it was okay, but it was your reality, and it was all you had. It was the truth of your life and there was no escape. So you stole moments of comfort together, hands clutched desperately. You made French your shared language, a secret Riko couldn’t take from you. You gave every last scrap of goodness you had to Jean and left yourself hollow and aching so when Riko came to carve you out, there would be nothing for him to latch onto.

*

Riko got you alone the first time he took a blade to you. You see, you were special. You were not like Jean. You were Riko’s plaything, but a little more valuable than the others for bearing Kayleigh Day’s name. Riko had to treat you with a little more care, but apparently his patience had grown thin.

“You’re mine,” Riko had said, as he made you strip your shirt off, made you lay on the bed, made you put your hands above your head. You were just starting to fill out muscle, still young enough to look lanky and stringy rather than lean and strong, still growing into yourself. “You and Jean can whisper all the French you want, Kevin, but you’re mine.”

He had hit you so many times. You had spent so much of your young life aching and throbbing and in pain. You thought you were ready for it, but when the first slash of blade came across your skin, you hissed and arched from the bed. Your hands reached to stop him and Riko held the blade pointed towards you, unspoken threat.

“Keep your hands up there, Kevin, or I’ll cut your fingers off.”

You tried so hard. You clutched the headboard in a white knuckled grip, until your hands _ached_ from the force of it, tremors running down your arms. Your eyes burned, and your throat was tight and hot, and you didn’t know when you had started sobbing, but each cut was ripping them raw and painful from you.

Riko crossed over one of the earlier cuts and it was too much. You lashed out, and he caught your hand. He brought the blade down on the sensitive skin between your index and middle finger and dragged it back like a saw.

You _wailed_. Your vision whited out, and then you were back on the bed, your hand seeping blood and staining the sheets.

“I told you not to move,” Riko said. “This is your fault, Kevin.”

*

You heard that a lot.

Dragged down by the collar and slapped hard in the face.

_This is your fault._

Riko’s hand around Jean’s throat, watching his skin taint purple, the bulge of his eyes as he tried to breathe, his hands beneath your knees as you kept him pinned down.

 _This is your fault_.

In the nightmares where your mom dragged herself up from the scrapped wreck of her car, bleeding heavily as she staggered towards you, wounds you recognised; slashes on her torso, bruises on her wrists, a black eye, a fractured cheekbone, blood pouring freely from her nose and into her mouth, staining her teeth, drowning her. Her voice a gurgle through the blood:

_This is your fault, Kevin._

*

When you were deemed old enough - which wasn’t really old enough, but in the Raven’s Nest the world bent to Riko’s rules - your numbers were branded into your skin permanently. The raw, burning ache of it felt fitting, you thought.

It took yours and Jean’s weeks to heal properly. In the time when they were fresh and achy, Riko’s favourite pastime became pressing his thumb into your numbers, digging the nail against the tenderness, pressing harder and harder until he got you to wince, then pressing harder again because he could. 

It was official. You were Kevin Day: Raven Number Two, for good, now. That was all you were and that was all you would ever be. Any other possible futures blackened and died.

Which is why when you got your hands on that letter, when you read your father’s name, when you traced your fingertip over the letters again and again and again with hope and happiness swelling so large in your chest it made it difficult to breathe, you pushed it down. Why you folded the letter and hid it in a book and buried dreams of getting to know a father who might care for you the way your mom once had.

Maybe if you were a different Kevin. Maybe if you weren’t chained to this place. Maybe if David Wymack had known of you before you were collared and the end of your leash put in Riko’s hand, tugging your choke chain tighter and tighter around your throat.

Maybe before you were Number Two and nothing more.

*

The thing about Evermore was that it taught you how to feel pain so distinctly, but nothing else. You did not learn how to handle emotions; brittle and confusing and volatile things. Your brain was hardwired for the court, for movement and strategy and player weaknesses, but off the court you were useless. You had never learned how to communicate in ways that did not hurt. You were not allowed friendship, and conflict was just as likely to end with you pushed down onto a bed or over the closest surface as it was with a fist in your face.

That was the very thing that shattered you and Jean. Something you had absently fantasised about in the secret hours, something you dared not breathe to life, and it had happened, but in Riko’s command, under Riko’s gaze. It was not the shared intimacy it should have been but an act of humiliation, one more violent display of Riko’s control. Your hands trembled as you undressed and Jean gave you a look that you knew too well.

_We’re doing what we have to to survive._

You had bit your tongue through it. Had blinked back tears. Had tried so hard to block out the soft, muffled sounds of Jean, the louder, cruel sounds of Riko’s laughter. Your stomach had been a queasy twist of knots and bile had burned sharp and bitter in your throat. 

You couldn't stand to look at Jean for days. 

“See?” Riko had said when you were done, cold and shaken to your core. He had grabbed your hair and ripped your head back and bit hard enough into your throat that you had choked a sob. “You’re better with me, Kevin. You’re mine and you always will be.”

_This is your fault._

*

The further into the spotlight Riko dragged you with him, the further behind Jean stayed in the shadows. He was the boy you had adored more than anything, the speck of light in your darkness, and now the distance between you stretched. The purity of your relationship forever tarnished by what Riko had made you do.

You told yourself it was better this way. The closer you were, the more Riko’s jealousy prompted him to lash out. Your mistakes often ended up as Jean’s punishments, and it was one thing to be the cause of your own pain, another thing entirely to be the cause of someone else’s.

So you took your fondness and you buried it deep inside yourself. You cloaked yourself in ice and apathy. You choked down sentiment and you smothered the Kevin who loved. Love was a weakness there and you could not afford any more weaknesses. You were already cracked at the seams. You were already broken apart and shoved back together too many times. Your only defence against Riko was sharpening all your edges, but that meant cutting everyone else, too.

*

Thea was not like Jean. Where Jean was hushed whispers and gentle hands and soft eyes, Thea was angry and vicious and violent. Thea was someone you thought it would be much harder for Riko to break.

Riko tried anyway. Forced you together in the same way he had with Jean, and you tried to block him out, but his gaze scorched into you, made shame bubble beneath your skin, seared the experience, tainted it like Riko tainted everything. 

You had already lost Jean in the ways that mattered. Thea was a gamble, but you became addicted to the adrenaline fear of every clandestine note, addicted to the attention and flattery. Thea was pretty and older and had the attention of boys her age, but she still saw worth in you, still gave you her time and attention, and you did not question why you clutched so tightly to that, why you desperately sought it out again and again. Any feeling that was not hurtful in some way was rare, so you just assumed what Thea made you feel was happiness, and you edged around the danger to tentatively grasp at it when you could. You knew you and Thea were a game of Russian roulette, each risked interaction a pull of the trigger. You didn’t know for sure who’s head the barrel was aimed at, who would take the blow if this came to light.

Probably Thea.

_It would be your fault._

You chased the adrenaline and the validation of attention that was not pain, and you told yourself it was happiness. You didn’t know any different. You’d forgotten by that stage what true happiness felt like.

*

Privacy was a luxury the Nest did not afford you, and that made it difficult to process anything. Riko was always _there_. You couldn’t get a break from him to soothe yourself, let alone deal with the pain you’d already accumulated. You lay tense and stiff at night and waited for him to fall asleep so finally, finally, you could fucking cry, could let some of the pressure from the weight in your chest.

You had nightmares frequently, and Riko’s bitter mockery made the shaky aftermath worse. Your body had learned now to instinctively shove the blanket to your mouth when you surged awake in an adrenaline shock. To muffle your whimpers. To press down almost suffocating on yourself so the sounds of your pain wouldn’t wake Riko. 

He enjoyed seeing you cry. You didn’t want to give him any more satisfaction than what he already ripped forcefully from you. You stole secret moments in the dark, let your emotional weakness seep through the cracks in your shell, and then you pulled yourself back together and got on with it.

*

Exy was your outlet. It was the cause of all this, but it was the one thing that drove you forward, kept you struggling to survive instead of giving in to the destruction. Your life was not your own and you were subject to Riko’s every whim, but on the court, stick in your hand, that was the only time you had power. The only time you had some control. 

Exy was also your only connection to your parents. Both of them. The mother who had helped create this game and who had spent so many days teaching you, playing with you when you were little. This was all you had left of her. The father who was out there somewhere coaching a different team. You wondered if he saw your games, if he thought you were good, if he would have been proud to know you were his son.

Exy was the only thing you actually enjoyed in the shitty, repetitive, painful excuse for your life, and so you threw yourself into it; constantly pushing yourself past your limits, constantly expecting more, constantly improving.

You got better, and better, and better, but it wasn’t just yourself you were getting better than.

“Don’t forget your place, Kevin,” Riko had said. “It’s not you that’s number one.”

 _Fuck you_ , you had thought, bitter and angry. You’d spent enough time restricting yourself to let Riko shine. Your strength would be the strength of the team. It was counterintuitive for you to hold back.

Riko didn’t think so.

*

“I warned you, Kevin. I told you to know your place.”

“If you want to be better than me, you should train harder,” you had said, swallowing around the lump in your throat. Your body knew the drill. The tone in Riko’s voice had already set off a freeze response. Your blood felt ice cold, all your muscles tensing and stiffening in place. 

“Hold him down,” Riko said, and you were confused to see several of your team come from the shadows. You tilted your head and looked at Jean, but he didn’t meet your eye. You didn’t need a group to hold you down. You knew how things went by now. Only one person, usually, if the pain was bad enough. “I warned you. This is your fault.”

Then Riko took one of the fingers on your left hand and pulled it sharply. You heard the crack before you registered the pain, shock slowing your system as you realised what Riko was doing. Then the pain hit and you yelled out. The group holding you made sense as you flailed desperately, violently, trying everything in your power to break free of them.

“You could have kept playing if you weren’t such a show off,” Riko said, pressing down on your broken finger until you screamed. “Perhaps it’s in your blood. I heard your mother didn’t know her place either.”

There was something suggestive in his tone and your stomach clenched. You heaved, thankfully dry, then screamed again as Riko snapped another of your fingers. 

“Please, Riko, please stop, please don’t. Please, no, no, don’t. I’ll play worse. I’ll do anything. Don’t do this, anything but this, anything, Riko, please, _no_.” A desperate string of babbled pleading, begging that you hadn’t done since you were young and new to his torture, a sign of your terror, but Riko ignored you.

You were pinned there, soaked in cold sweat, thrashing against the team you had stood alongside for years, your team, the people supposed to have your back, their hands pressing you down hard enough to leave bruises, as Riko took everything from you. Breaking you down bit by bit as he took your hand apart. Your chest ached. You could barely draw breath through the weight of your sobs.

You hardly felt the pain now, shock numbing the edges, but it didn’t matter. The physical pain was only a side effect. Riko had taken everything that mattered to you and everything you were and he had shattered it, and you both knew that was always the true violence here.

“What a sorry accident, Kevin. You’re just so clumsy.”

*

“You can’t go,” Jean said, voice edged with desperation as you shoved the few personal belongings you had into a bag. You looked longingly at your books lining the wall. You’d miss them. “Kevin.”

“I’m not staying here.” You clumsily pulled your bag up over your shoulder with your uninjured hand.

“He’ll catch you. He’ll bring you back. He’ll kill you.”

“It will kill me if I stay here. Slower and more painfully.”

“You have nowhere to go.”

“I’ll find somewhere.”

“Kevin-“

“I can’t, Jean. I can’t stay here any longer. I’m going. Riko can drag my dead body back if he fucking wants. He’s already done the worst.” You wave your plastered hand in front of Jean. “I’m done.”

Your voice broke, and the threat of tears, stinging and so familiar, ached behind your eyes. Jean sighed, looking scared and defeated, and helped straighten your bag for you. 

“I’ll miss you,” he said softly in French.

“Come with me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I’m not like you, Kevin. I’m property. I- I can’t go.”

“And I can’t stay,” you repeated. 

You didn’t look back when you left. You couldn’t risk Jean causing your resolve to waver.

*

You hadn’t fully expected Wymack to help you, especially when you still kept the secret of your relationship buried deep. You were pathetic. A broken mess, a hasbeen. You wouldn’t want you as your son, so why put that on anyone else? Especially when it would bring the risk of the Moriyamas on them. 

But Wymack had still taken you on without a second’s hesitation once you presented your broken hand. Had given you a place to stay and a connection back to the sport that had become your world.

You sobbed, when he first said yes. You had been fighting so hard to stay cool and calm and collected, but the stress had been building since you left, since Riko broke your hand, since your mother was fucking taken from you. Building over the years and the floodwaters were beating hard against the dam of your self control. The smallest sign of genuine kindness enough to have them collapsing, the water crashing down.

Wymack was not particularly good at comforting, but you were not particularly good at being comforted. The fact he tried was enough. A box of tissues pushed your way and awkward pats on the back. Your face was raw and blotchy by the time you were done, nose tender and eyes burning, but you felt lighter. 

*

You hadn’t expected freedom to be so terrifying. Without the strict Raven schedule, you didn’t know what to do with yourself. You didn’t know how to interact with people. You were constantly terrified of Riko tracking you down and dragging you back. You were constantly coiled tense and tight, every shadow or sudden sound making you jump.

Freedom didn’t feel like being free. Rather than tortured by Riko as a person, you were now tortured by the idea of Riko, the threat of his presence. The nightmares were chronic. Your hand ached constantly. You didn’t know how to fit in with people who were not Ravens, who did not understand. More often than not your clumsy words offended and wounded.

So mostly you drank. A lot. Until the sharp edges of your mind smoothed out. Until you forgot what fear felt like. Until you could convince yourself leaving was the right choice.

*

Wymack gave you a new team and a new place you were supposed to belong, but you didn’t. You kept yourself closed off and defensive, attacked people before they could attack you; cutting criticism and sharp words. This was the version of communication you had been raised on and it did not go down well. 

The only words you had that were not harsh or exy related were about history; facts you loved, facts you collected with fascination and adoration and stored away in the spaces around exy in your brain, but when you tried to share, you got brushed off, and so you learned that people were no different wherever you went. They never cared. You learned to shut up. 

Wymack gave you a new team, and they hated you, so you focused on the game and not the people, because at least exy was always reliable. Exy was the same wherever you were, something familiar and comfortable you could fall back to, a language you could speak without clumsily tripping over words.

You heard the complaints and the insults and whispers, and you pretended you did not care, and why should you, really, it wasn’t like you hadn’t heard worse where you had come from, it wasn’t like you’d dared to hope you might actually make friends here.

It wasn’t like it mattered.

*

The only place you felt whole was the court, and so you started training your other hand. You didn’t know what else you could do, who else you could be. Any dreams you might once have had had been stamped out of you, and all you knew how to be was Kevin Day; striker. 

You weren’t good at talking to people. You weren’t good at being nice. You weren’t good at friendship. You didn’t get pop culture. You didn’t know their music. You had been so cut off from the world you felt like a foreign entity trying to connect, so you stopped trying, and you focused back on the one thing you’d ever been good at.

Every day was a frustration. Your right arm was clumsy. You missed hits that you would have done as easy as breathing before. You tired out quicker, pushed yourself beyond exhaustion anyway, ended up dropping your racquet from weak, shaking fingers.

You spent more than one night collapsed on the ground of the court crying. Clutching your left hand to your chest and sobbing deep and wretched; mourning sobs. Mourning for the loss of yourself. You didn’t feel whole without a racquet in your hand.

*

Your right hand got stronger, and it wasn’t perfect, but it was something.

You helped Wymack pick out new recruits, built up a team, and they weren’t perfect either, but they were something.

Andrew Minyard looked at you with cold eyes. Clutched your shirt and dragged you down and you felt the familiar suffocating fear, the certainty you were about to get very hurt, but instead he had said _I’ll keep you alive_ and your heart had squeezed tight and intense in your chest. _I’ll keep you alive._

*

Andrew was your protector, and therefore it was easy to let it go when he hurt you. When he hit or pulled or choked you. The sight of him drawing a blade still had fear rising, cloying and frantic in your throat, the feeling like it was trying to claw out through your skin, but it was fine. You could shrug it off when Andrew threatened you, because he was going to keep you safe.

That was the difference between him and Riko.

You told yourself this, again and again and again, ignored the familiar overlap in the way they took things out on you. A small price to pay for protection, even if the protection sometimes felt like what he was meant to be protecting you from.

You just kept your panic attacks to yourself. Took yourself away from everyone when your chest got tight and your pulse felt heavy and frantic. Hyperventilated and wheezed alone, running an internal dialogue the whole time of how fucking stupid this was. You knew that. You didn’t want to be panicking, but it came anyway, wrapped tendrils around your throat and choked you out until you could only pull in short, sharp breaths. You scratched your wrist bone raw, clenched your left hand in your right and pressed your thumb to the palm in pulses, trying to chase away phantom aches.

A small price to pay for someone between you and Riko.

*

It felt like a release when you finally got to play again. Nowhere near your usual standard, but you were back on a court, back where you thrived, back in the space where for the length of a game the world couldn’t touch you. Where you were free and you had control and choice and power. 

You knew what they were saying about you. Calling you a traitor. A deserter. You tried not to read the online comments, but you saw the news sometimes, of course you did, you followed exy obsessively, and so you knew what they said about you. How people who had sworn to support you now turned on you.

That was fine. That was no surprise. That was the story of your life.

It didn’t matter. You were back in your space. You were starting to feel like you fit in your skin again, like it wasn’t too tight and suffocating, like there might come a day where you could feel okay, you could be happy doing this.

Then the Ravens changed districts and you knew, you _knew_ , this was only a temporary reprieve and now it had come to an end.

“What are you doing?” Wymack had said, as you dropped the phone call with Jean and started to move.

“I have to go back. He’s only doing this to come for me. If I go back, he’ll be less angry. If I apologise, maybe he won’t break my hand again, maybe-“

“Kevin, no.”

“Let me go.”

“I won’t let you go back there.”

“It’ll be worse if I don’t,” you said, the certainty fueling the panic. Your hand throbbed with the memory of pain. Every nerve ending was raw, fear causing you a physical ache. Easier to bare your throat willingly than be beaten down and forced to.

He had tried to stop you. Good intentions feeling like barbed wire against your skin. The feeling of being restrained sending you back to the team holding you down, the crack of your bones. You had thrashed and lashed out, blind with panic, but Wymack had not given up on you.

Eventually, exhausted, you sagged on his couch. 

“Andrew and I will take care of Riko. You just focus on playing,” he said, and you didn’t believe him, but you had been conditioned all your life not to fight back, and the brief rebellion had exhausted you. So you nodded, took the bottle he handed you, and drank yourself into oblivion.

*

When Kathy Ferdinand sprang the surprise of Riko on you it was like being dropped into freezing water. Your muscles tensed and locked up, and you had to struggle not to start gasping for breath on fucking early morning tv. You were sinking, sinking, sinking deep down inside yourself, watching detached as years of media training had you running on autopilot through a fake polite greeting with Riko. Your mouth ached from holding the smile that tasted more like a grimace in place.

Riko pulled you to your feet and the embrace was all show. His fingers dug hard into your arm, a reminder. _You belong to me_. You almost sat on Neil when you sank back into the couch, his thigh the only point of grounding as the world started to crumble around you. The edges of your vision were white static. You swallowed panic, but your throat was already full of it.

“-injury was Kevin’s to bear, but we all suffered for it.”

You didn’t hear everything he was saying, but you heard that. A small fire of indignant rage flickered in your chest, but Riko was quick to put it out with layer after layer of words as carefully sharpened as his blades. Constantly undermining. Constantly ridiculing. Constantly reminding you of how little and meaningless you were in the grand scheme; merely the insect Riko would crush beneath his heel. 

Neil was the one to bring you crashing back. Where words caught in your chest, they flowed freely from him, and your nervous system went full alarm. Could he not see this was a raging fire and he had lifted the gas canister instead of the watering can?

You still clutched to that pyrotechnic like a lifeline, though. Thanked Kathy like the words were sawdust in your mouth when it was done and let Neil manhandle you away, feeling too sunk down inside your body to control your limbs.

The elbow to the face was less of a shock than Neil’s hand on Riko’s shirt, Neil dragging his attention away. Andrew’s protection was part of a deal, but Neil had given his without exchange. You might have cried if you weren’t so clenched tight in terror. You did cry, just a few tears, when Abby crushed you to her in a hug. You closed your eyes and imagined for a moment that she was your mother and that your life was anything other than this.

*

Seth died.

_This is your fault._

Seth died, and you felt the weight of that, and you couldn’t show it or they would blame you, couldn’t think about it or you would spiral yourself, so you brushed it aside, honed your focus back on the game.

_This is your fault._

Seth died, and you had never been close, but you never wanted him to fucking die.

_This is your fault._

Ten Foxes down to nine. Suspicious, if the team started dropping, but not impossible. Not for someone with Riko’s influence behind them.

_This is your fault._

You had known Riko was ruthless, but this was unexpected. You kept your face blank and brushed off Nicky’s grief and when you were alone you pressed knuckles hard to your mouth and shuddered out the breath you felt you’d been holding since you first heard.

_This is your fault, this is your fault, this your fault._

*

_Spineless. Hasbeen. Cripple. Coward._

They shouldn’t have hurt. You had been called worse things. You had been forced to _be_ worse things, and those were merely playground insults compared to the kind of cruelty Riko had hissed to you.

_Spineless._

They hurt anyway. Stuck on the barbs in your head. Outside voices confirming the thoughts you already harboured about yourself.

_Hasbeen._

You felt like your insecurities must have been visible, must have been printed on your skin just as clearly as the brand of that number two. How else did they manage to hit on them so precisely?

_Cripple._

Even the things you were powerless over, you blamed yourself for. If you were stronger. If you had fought harder. If you were more. If only you hadn’t of been such a-

_Coward._

You didn’t choose to have fear set deep in your bones. You didn’t condition yourself into freeze or fawn reactions. You had never wanted to learn playing dead as a coping mechanism. It was never in your plans to be such a-

_Coward._

It was imprinted into you. Terror reinforced over years of every kind of abuse.

_Coward._

You thought when you got away it would stop. That you could shake it off. That you would find strength and bravery and the fear response wouldn’t hit as hard.

_Coward._

You thought you could be more than this. You thought you could be something else, but you’re not, and they all see it, all say it, burn it into the core of your identity.

_Coward._

You accept it like your scarlet letter because you never learned forgiveness, especially not towards yourself.

*

Neil went to Evermore and you went to New York and the entire time you felt sick. You couldn’t protect Jean, you couldn’t protect your team, you couldn’t protect Andrew, and now you couldn’t protect Neil.

You didn’t know if he was going to come back alive.

Then he did, scarred and inked, and Andrew came back, dead eyed and quiet, and how could you stand in the face of someone so determined to get to you they were picking their way through everyone close to you?

_It’s only a matter of time until he gets me again._

*

After everything Neil had been through, it felt like telling Wymack the truth should have been a small task, but still, your hands trembled. He was the only family you had left, and you were not sure you could handle seeing rejection in his gaze. You were certain he wouldn’t say anything negative, but you knew, once you dropped the truth, there would be a moment where his face would betray everything. There was no coming back from that moment. It would flavour the future from that point on.

Even though he’d keep you on, if you saw a negative reaction, you’d know; you were well and truly alone. 

You had to do this. You swallowed fear and told him in a voice that shook more than you would have liked. His face was frozen in shock for a moment, but then his eyes softened, the corners of his mouth creased with emotion, and you felt like the vulnerable, crumbling wreck that had come to him with your broken hand so long ago. He had not hesitated then and he did not hesitate now.

He hugged you fiercely and you clutched back to him and you both pretended not to notice the other’s tears. 

*

Every run in with Riko shook you, but it was seeing Jean again that shattered you. Regret and guilt mixed in with the fear and panic. When you picked up the broken bits to piece yourself together again you tried to build more resolve into yourself. 

Riko had raised a challenge, and for once you were on the outside, were able to rally back against him rather than crumble beneath him. It was terrifying, and every instinct in you screamed to run, because they knew he equated only to anger and danger and pain.

He couldn’t reach you anymore, but he could still reach Jean, and when Renee brought him to you a broken wreck, barely held together, your resolve hardened into steel. 

Jean wouldn’t look you in the eye. That was okay. You could barely stand to look at yourself, either.

*

It was just a tattoo. That’s how everyone else saw it. Except it wasn’t. It was a symbol, a claim, a brand. It was Riko and the Ravens’ hold over you. It was the life you had spent trapped in the cult of the Nest. It was a prisoner number printed into your skin forever, a barcode, a claim.

Getting it tattooed over was an act of rebellion so large and daunting it made your knees shake, but you wanted to, you wanted so fucking much to get the last traces of them from you, to get rid of that scar that made your stomach twist more than any of your actual scars. 

Wymack took you. His first real action not just as your coach, but as your _father_. Let you grasp his hand so tightly it must have ached, but he never complained. He never commented on your trembling, your hyperventilating, your tears.

He drove you back to the dorms and helped you to the elevator with your trembling legs, pried the vodka bottle from your shaky fingers.

“I think that’s enough, son.” 

He meant it colloquially, but you both flustered. You hugged him hard before he tucked your in the elevator and pressed the button to your floor for you. 

“See you tomorrow.”

You nodded, watched as the doors closed and took him from your sight, touched the bandage on your face and felt the enormity of what you’d done.

You were no longer confined to being Kevin Day: Raven Number Two.

*

You won.

Aching, exhausted, disbelieving, but you won. Years of your throat being crushed beneath Riko’s foot and finally you had come out on top. The exhilaration of that victory burned so fiercely through you that for a moment you forgot fear, forget anxiety, forgot panic. For a moment you were just blissfully riding a victory high.

Then you heard the crack, the clatter of a racquet falling to the ground. Then you saw Riko’s arm limp by his side as he was taken off the court. The vindication that curled in your stomach felt like poison, bitter and sharp and cruel. It was laced at the edges with fear, with the future promise of rebuttal, but in that moment part of you wished you had been the one to bring the racquet down.

*

When you heard of Riko’s death, it took the air from you. Shock was cold and heavy and you walked around in a daze for the rest of the day. 

It should have been a relief, _was_ a relief, but it was also more painful than you were expecting. You were truly free now, but it was tainted with a grief much heavier than you wanted to carry, heavier even than that of your mother because it came with such mixed feelings.

Second to exy, Riko had been the longest running constant in your life. The majority of your memories involved him. So many of the experiences that had shaped you intricately tied back to him. He was entangled in the core of your being, and as much as he had hurt you, as much as he had terrified you, as much as you had hated him, a part of you had also loved him, against your will, in spite of yourself. 

Losing him felt like losing a chunk of yourself. You carried the gaping, aching, raw wound of that loss with you, would probably carry it with you for years. 

It won’t get lighter, but it’ll get easier to carry. Past experience taught you that. 

He’s gone now, at last, and sometimes you still jump at sudden noises, still skitter away from shadows, but you’re Kevin Day: Queen of Exy, Kevin Day: Son of Wymack, Kevin Day: whoever the fuck you choose to be. 

You think now you can maybe start to leave parts of your fear behind, leave them buried with Riko. 

You think now you can maybe start to heal. 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway. There’s a lot of valid reasons to criticise Kevin’s character. Attacking his trauma response isn’t one of them. He’s hyper focused to the point where he’s dismissive of other things. He’s inconsiderate of other peoples feelings, often reads callous. He’s egotistical. He’s impatient, rarely displays empathy, lashes out. But his fear is a genuine reaction to years of intense abuse. 
> 
> Be aware real abuse victims can see you when you pop off in fandom spaces. Reducing Kevin to a coward reduces the impact and weight of the abuse he suffered. The fact that he not only left the Ravens, but also went back to a sport he knew he’d have to see Riko in sooner or later, reclaimed what he loved, and managed to stand up against his abuser (even if it was with trembling limbs and a shaky voice and frozen muscles) is actually an incredible show of his strength, bravery, and resilience.


End file.
